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Some changing lines don't make sense

pagan

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I know it has been discussed a great deal in the past about what the changed hexagram means in relationship to the changing line in the first hexagram. But what I can't reconcile is the fact that, theoretically, if you get a particular changing line, it then changes into a new hexagram that is supposed to be relevent. IOW, every time I get hexagram 6 line 6 (fruitless competition) it leads to 47 (exhaustion). What could be more logical and obvious? I can also see how 28 line 3 leads to 47. It pushes it a bit, but I can even stretch to see how 29 line 4 can lead to 47. But why, for example, does 45 line 2 lead to 47? Why does 40 line 5 lead to 47? Why does 57 line 1 lead to 47?

I just picked hex 47 out of the hat. You can use any hexagram for analysis. Sometimes the fit is like a perfectly tailored glove, other times it is just off the wall.

What is missing here is any coherent pattern that explains why the changing lines are truly valid as principles of nature. It makes me doubt that there really is supposed to be a 'resulting hexagram'.
P.
 

martin

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I think that the problem is partly in the 'lead to': you apparently see the second hexagram as representing a future development. But in general is doesn't represent that.
The terms 'changing line' and 'resulting hexagram' are misleading here.
 

martin

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In my experience the second hexagram often reflects the question or the situation of the questioner.
So if you get 45 to 47 the question was perhaps '47?'. Or the situation feels like 47. The answer, line 2 of 47, says something like 'no it isn't 47' or 'it doesn't need to be', among other things.
The second hex is not clearly related to future, in most cases.
Of course there are always exceptions!
 

bradford_h

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Pagan-
This is why I use transitional hexagrams and change the lines in sequence instead of all at once.
 

pagan

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Hi Bradford,
So you have as many hexagrams as you have changing lines? How exactly do you do that?
P.
 

bradford_h

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Hi Pagan-
Let's say you get 01.1,2,3 > 12
You just change the lines in the order you get them
and read these texts:
01, 01.1(>44), 44.2(>33), 33.3(>12), 12
It's not any more reading than before, but it tells a more complete (and less contradictory) story.
It's a little more like reading a string of Tarot cards.
 
P

prynne

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Hi Pagan!

Changing lines that don't make sense, or obvious sense, is a fascinating subject. 48 line 6 for example to 57 is what I am considering now. : the open well (line 6), 'seals bestowed' (57) (LiSe).

45 line 2 to 47, your example, , i would reach out internally in a stifling situation, is one idea that comes to mind, but without a particular question tied to it, it is hard to say. Still, I think it provides really interesting food to think on.
 

hilary

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Of course if you have just the one changing line, then there's no difference between the two methods. You still have to find the connection, if there is one, between 45,2 and 47.

Like Martin said, if you impose one particular logical relation 'leads to' on every line, you will have problems. Also if you read 47 as nothing but 'exhaustion', within the limits of the English word's associations, it probably won't help. There's both more scope and more precision to be had by going a little further in.

45,2 - hm, yes, fun. Gathering together, investing together, within the harsh limits of oppression and mistrust of #47. How to cope? Making only a small offering but with great sincerity seems a good start.

40,5. Release within entrapment?

58,1 (not 57
happy.gif
). This one had me stumped until I read LiSe's site:
"Inner contentment, not needing anything from outside, is the base of freedom. You find your power within yourself. Making a real good contact with others is only possible when this inner freedom exists."

A lot depends on starting with the assumption that this makes sense in its own terms - so if I don't get it yet, that's something for me to work on. (Something similar works with people
wink.gif
.)
 

pagan

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Thank you Hillary, your perspective does help to clarify. But what I am wrestling with is the IC as a template, a complete template, for all that happens in life. From that premise, then each relationship of the IC is not dependant on events that happen to us, but rather, they are indicative of universal laws that show how all aspects of life are interconnected. From that pov, every relationship should give us a lesson about subtle layers of reality, and be universally true. So the 'principle of 58 line 1 that always points to 47' is beyond any specific life circumstance, but rather, an expression of the nature of relatedness of archetypes. I hope this isn't too obtuse.

But I have to say that I am enamored of Bradfords notion that 01, 01.1(>44), 44.2(>33), 33.3(>12), 12 . Taking this more complicated view of the overall reading, it does give you more to chew on about why stagnation would be resultant from the changing lines 1, 2 and 3 in hexagram 1.
p.
 

pagan

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Bradford,
so if we got hex 1 with all changing lines, which gives us hexagram 2:
1.1=44, 44.2=33, 33.3=12, 12.4=20, 20.5=23 and 23.6=2 . I have never seen this done before.

So to interpret as a story, a seed of something naughty 1.1/44 must not be allowed to contaminate what you respect 44.2/33 so one should retreat from negative things.

Surrounded by lesser people and things, you go through a period of stagnation 33.3/12.

Eventually, you will hook up with those of like mind and gain valuable insight 12.4/20

which will lead to ultimately leaving behind the negative temptation and splitting with what is inferior. 20.6/23

This in turn leads to the end of the negative situation 23.6/2.

Very interesting, I'll have to try this on my next readings to see what happens in other cases.
Thanks.
P.
 

dobro p

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It's a neat trick, the way it leads to the same relating hexagram via the other hexagrams, but here are three questions:

* Isn't it too linear? Linear is a fond illusion of our minds, right?

* Why start with the lowest line and go up in sequence? Why sequential like that? Sequential is another fond illusion of our minds often, right? (I mean, it doesn't matter which activated line you start with, you still get to the same final relating hexagram, but you go a different route, via different hexagrams.)

* What's wrong with conflicting messages when you have multiple activated lines? That's life, right? Situations and minds *often* have conflicts. From the microcosmic vantage point, anyway. The macrocosmic view sees it all as harmony. Or so I've been told lol. So, the macrocosmic view would see Hex 1 inclined in the direction of Hex 12 in Brad's example above. But the microcosmic perception (down here on planet earth looking out two human eyes and interpreted by a very human personality) seems contradictory in some ways.
 

pagan

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When you study nature, and humans--as another aspect of nature--then I think that order is something supremely at the heart of what is aesthetically preferred by the human mind. Order is efficient, and nature is conservative--something that loves efficiency. Nature seems to seek an order to be super-imposed upon itself. Nature (mater, matter, maternal) seeks an order (pater, pattern, paternal) like molding clay into the likes of something. Nature is made 'animated' by order. Like the skeleton of the body gives a blob of flesh and tissue its order, order also gives it movement-as a skeleton enables a body to walk, work, accomplish.

The IC is like a pattern superimposed over the chaos of nature, giving it form, personality and structure. You can also lift the pattern of the IC off and replace it with the system of astrology, or the system of Tarot, or some religious of philosophical system. Nature is always accomodating to the Creative. Creative intelligence is based in order. And order is what we seek when we turn to the IC for answers.
P.
 

jerryd

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Seeking order from chaos? Now this is very intresting.I would think Chris's method was one which does just this. Although I have no dout it cannot be of much use as an individual method it does appear to try to do just that. I find life to be explained in all ways by the Yi and it's hex's. I will apply what I learn and adjust as learning makes things clearer to what intellect is avilable. The chaos is within the human psyche and it makes its way through avaliable paths in each individual into a cognitive or comprehension equilivent to individual understanding at the moment of transition. What I may believe in one second may alter through information or pseudo understanding from one interpertation to the next (interpertation here is in reference to cognitive belief) . My need is to be aware of the individual question and my self circumstance before I speak.
 

bradford_h

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Hi guys-
I've said before that transitional hexagrams are still in "Beta Testing", the method only being 30 years old as far as I know. So I'm just making the suggestion to test the method, nothing more.
But one of the reasons they make sense to me is that each step in the process tracks each particular Yao or Changing Line in conjunction with the Zhi Gua towards which the text was first written (that's IMO). I personally am familiar with this relationship because I've made a study of it and the connections are easy for me to follow.
But this makes me doubly curious how it will play in other minds.
We humans, after all, are able to read great significance into the spreading of chicken entrails and the clumping of tea leaves.
 
S

seeker

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Actually most scientist believe there is an order to the universe and what we see as chaos is part of that order, just a larger pattern that we cannot make sense of because we do not have all the details. Its like trying to make sense of a story that has paragraphs missing.

As for the resulting hexagram, I agree that it does not always mean if you follow this line, this is the result. If it is more than one moving line, sometimes they can represent choices or people involved. I have also found that for only one moving line, the resulting hex is what will happen if you don't follow the advice. Not an approach I have seen from anyone else, but in looking back over some of my readings, in cases where I did not listen or misinterpreted it, it was then that I experienced the resulting hex. Perhaps then Yi is showing us the result, because even as if offers us the advice, it already knows we are not going to follow it
happy.gif
 

pagan

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Hi Seeker,
So if your resulting hexagram is 42, or 14 or 11 then you best not follow the advice given in order to have a pleasant outcome?
P.
 

pagan

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Hi Jerry,
Not "Seeking order from chaos" but rather "overlaying the field" (or the context or the stuff or substance of existence--nature) with a pattern. I hold that there is no inherent pattern in Hexagram 2, that hexagram 1 seeks to give a pattern to hexagram 2 and this creates life in all its myriad forms as represented in Hex 3.

In the same way the Magician card in tarot, 1, gives its animating spirit to the High Priestess, 2, which germinates and creates the bountiful outer world, the Empress, 3. Or, in astrology, the male prinicple Aries, 1 (active fire), fertilizes the female principle Taurus (fixed earth), 2 and the result is the multiplicity of life, gemini (mutable air), 3.

For example, a forest may contain all the parts to a cabin, but the parts must be taken from nature (chaos) and specific patterns must be applied that involve measurement and manipulation and transformation (order). Yin is the matter that has no inherent 'meaning' and Yang is the order and pattern that gives meaning and identity.

Don't confuse the word chaos with 'chaotic' or 'anarchy'. In this context, chaos is just "matter in its potential state".

P.
 
C

candid

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Pardon over-simplification here, but...

condensation leads to rain
rain leads to condensation
unless there is wind to dissipate the clouds
or a cold mass which turns it to snow

nature isn?t fixed and always predictable
and change isn?t always obedient like a trained dog
elements effect elements
and outcomes can only be discovered in time
 

pagan

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Hi Candid,
Plato was the first to put forth the notion of an 'ideal reality', made up of archetypes. He called this the numinous world. The real world he called the phenomenous world. The ideal, numinous world is perfect and all of the relationships between things therein is perfectly ordered. Plato was mainly into astrology, not the IC, but the prinicple is the same. In astrology, you can see the relationships between planets and their geometric aspects as perfectly ordered principles. When you try to apply this to the real, phenomenal world, the possibilities often become too vast and complicated to calculate and practically apply them with any accuracy.

What I am saying here is that I have spent many years casting hexagrams and then comparing the answers to what really happened in the real world. But lately what I am studying is the relationships that are inherent in the 'ideal' form of the IC, not so much how it applies to oracles and the real life situations of people, but rather, to principles that describe the inherent nature of existence and the working of natural law. It is just a different focus and eventually it will enrich and deepen my understanding of practical application of IC principles in real life, in the same way that studying astrology from an 'ideal' standpoint enriched my understanding of how astrology operates in the real world.
 
C

candid

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Hi Pagan,

Yes, I understand the difference between models and nature, and I could see why you are interested in the Plato's approach to I Ching. But don't you feel that a huge and essential element is missing from this idealistic approach? When I read of exacting models here, I always ask myself 'why' this is so important when the actual observation of nature is more accurate. When I see reading interpretations that are completely black or white, this only means this and that only means that, I ask: what happens to everything in-between? So much reality becomes stuffed into tight categorical boxes; I have to wonder where life is in that. Life lives between the definitions, not inside them. Life is the contradictions and inconsistencies, not in the rules and formulas which describe life. Life is messier than that.

Plato's view was that the idea is greater than the reality of the idea. That thinking is lost on me, I'm afraid. Hence my plea to be pardoned for my over-simplification. I admit that I just don?t get it.
 

martin

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Some of us lean more to the concrete, others more to the abstract. Some are more into a thinking approach, others are more into feeling. It's not so much a matter of ability as of priority. Typical 'feelers' can have a very good thinking mind, but feeling comes first. Feeling is their primary means of orientation in life, their compass. For instance, I believe, based on what I know about him and his life, that Einstein was a feeler, not a thinker, as one might expect.

I suspect that you are also a feeler, Candid, with an inclination towards the concrete. But you may not like it when I try to imprison you in the categorical box 'concrete feeler', exactly because you are a concrete feeler. LOL.
But I'm a feeler myself (yes!), so I use such boxes in a fluid way and keep the doors of the prisons open.
happy.gif


Anyway, we need all these types, humanity would be seriously impoverished if one of them was missing. However, because of this diversity we also have all kinds of communication problems. Feelers and thinkers don't understand each other very well, neither do those who are inclined to abstractions and those who are more into the concrete. And there are other types ....
I feel/think/intuit/sense
howmuch.gif
that understanding of typology can help to bridge the differences.
 
C

candid

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I completely agree, Martin. With a thread header like "Some changing lines don't make sense", I "felt"
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it worth pointing out, 'making sense of change lines' requires more than a purely linear perspective.
 

jerryd

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Pagan. Candid, Martin, you have all allowed me to see in depth into your wisdom and I thank you, Pagan, you explaining your understanding of chaos is very helpful and I had seen this as something static and unsolvable, I can see from you perspective how you use it. Candid you profile of natural sequence fits exactly into my belief of how we are who we are as we develope just as nature predetermines all things. Martin, you reply on another thread where I had made a comment has insight and meaning which I find allows us to be of one mind. Thanking you all and others here on Clarity for important insight into the world of changeing lines.
 

pagan

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I spent 30 years or so studying the ICHING just by casting hexagrams and watching results. I have a written journal spanning 20 years of that time, as I tried to make correlations between what my oracle said about a thing, versus what I was seeing about a thing. So that was pretty pragmatic, where I didn't learn any of the more esoteric patterns and correlations that the IC is noted for. Now I want to study abstractions, but not to avoid a touchy feeling relationship with life, but rather because now I want to understand archetypes and their expressions at their 'seed' level, rather than in their method of expression in the outer world. But I glorify both approaches to studying the ICHING because, it offers fulfillment to every kind of mind.
P.
 
C

candid

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Pagan, I apologize if I underplayed the importance of pragmatism, or of your experience.

My points were not so much a bout a "touchy/feely" relationship with life, but the simple observation of how natural elements such as trigrams and change lines interact.

My understanding of archetypes is that they too lack absolute meanings, and that it is up to the individual to asign the local meaning and value to the universal image. IE: 52 is a mountain, but does this infer strength or stubborness to a given application?

So when you say that some changing lines don't make sense, to me that says: local meaning and value is what's missing from the puzzle. If our congnition fails to include our relationship with the object, the object has no way of connecting to our understanding.
 
C

candid

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What is the "seed" level value of a mountain when observed from the exosphere? Different than its "seed" level value from the foothills, looking up?

I think it was Heidegger who said that Plato was the first theoretical Christian - the establishment of meaning based on an idealistic principle, devoid of relativity to the observer.

These ultimate truths break down at the ultimate level. Therefore they are not ultimate at all.
 

pagan

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I suppose what I am saying here can be analogized by evolution in reverse. We take complex life forms and break them down to individual cells, which breaks down to individual atoms, which break down into atomic particles which break down into dynamic quantum fields and 11 dimensions of existence. The farther down the ladder you go, from complex to simple, the more power you observe. For example the atomic bomb, or fusion and fission energy. It is amazing how something so small can be so potent that it can blow up a whole city. Archetypes are even more powerful as only the Shaman and Yogis have attained the eyes to see and wisdom to understand.

There is a point when studying physics where cause and effect relationships totally break down and synchonicity and 'probability waves' become the structure of existence. This is the reality at the core of your body, my body, and every body's body and every observable thing.

Studying physics at the quantum level doesn't interest everyone. But it interests me very much. It seems that archetypes are the actual defining characteristics of matter, those quantum fields are intelligent and contain patterns. Even if these patterns cannot be exactly defined, that does not mean they can't be studied and their expressions understood. This is the great passion of the Shaman and Yogi's.

Archetypes seem to be what this whole world is made of. And physics is now running headlong into metaphysics, much to the dismay of hard science.

The seed quality of the mountain is found in the relationships between the upper and lower trigrams, the nuclear trigrams, the bigrams that came before the trigrams etc.

A hexagram is not a pure archetype because it contains many archetypes within it. The seed value of any hexagram will be a set of archetypes that are non-reducible to any other quality.

Examples of pure archetypes are yin/yang, numbers, colors, some geometric shapes, the notes of the musical scale and the elements. Yin and yang are the most non reducible archetypes and the other pure archetypes such as numbers, colors and forms are themselves sorted by their yin or yang nature (odd numbers yang, even numbers are yin etc.)

So, to answer your questions, no, there isn't a difference in the 'seed' nature of 52 depending on which angle you are viewing it from, because at this level of analysis there is no observer and no real world to interfere with the values of the abstractions.

On the level of the real world, a mountain is a vast and complicated thing that can mean death to one person and abundance to another. A real mountain has nothing to do with the archetypal mountain of the IC, except that it reflects the archetype.

Many people who believe in astrology think that it is really the planets in the heavens that bestow qualities into objects on earth, and believe that these cosmic rays affect the goings on happening on earth. But Plato saw the real planets in the sky as simply mirroring the archetypal 'gods' or 'forces' that exist in pure form only in the numinous world, not in the phenomenol world. But these pure archetypes are expressed in the phenomenol world, in various 'blended' forms. In other words, the real world is a mirror of an eternal, archetypal world. Pure archetypes can only exist in the numinous world, because in the phenomenol world there is already a mixing and blending of countless archetypes, in each particle of each atom of each molecule of each cell of everything on earth.
P.
 
C

candid

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Pagan,

Alright. Fair enough. I see it differently, but accept your view as possibly finer than my own. We do, however, have very different definitions of archetypes and shaman.

So then, what is your plan or approach to solve the problem you've presented? That of some changing lines which make no sense. Is it a philosophical solution, or mathematical equation? Will you find it within quantum physics or mechanics? I'm genuinely curious how you will bridge the gap sans the subjective observer.
 

pagan

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I think that it is as Plato says it is; the 'real world' the physical, tangible, sensate, dimensional thing that we call reality is really a temporary state of existence. That is a fact.

Without the physical dimension, there is a lot less separation between me and what is not me.
p.
 

bradford_h

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Hi Pagan-
Just to play advocatus diaboli here on your statement that

"the physical, tangible, sensate, dimensional thing that we call reality is really a temporary state of existence. That is a fact."

Lord Buddha would have said - Yes, that's exactly the problem.
And the authors of the Yi might say -
Temporary, Yes! exactly. The very basis of everything is change.

And personally, I just don't see how Eternal is all that it's cracked up to be.
 

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